He also displayed a ruthless cunning in working to secure his title. He married the daughter of Diocletian’s co-emperor, Maximian, then in 310 had his father-in-law arrested and strangled. The next year he allied himself with one rival, Licinius, in order to declare war on the other, Maximian’s son, Maxientius.
In late October 312, the two rivals’ armies converged on the outskirts of Rome. A single bridge across the Tiber River stood between them. Constantine was outnumbered; his men were exhausted after a grueling march up the spine of Italy. Maxentius’s troops were fresh and confident. Their mood had been buoyed by a pagan oracle that had announced as they marched out of the city that “an enemy of Rome would be killed” in the coming battle.
However, Constantine was not worried. In his tent a night or two before the battle (the accounts differ on the details), he had had a dream. He saw a glowing object in the dark, a cross with a loop at the top. Then he seemed to hear a voice say, “In this sign you will conquer.”1
By the measure of the age, Constantine was not a superstitious man. Like many in the army he chose to worship a god called the Sol Invictus, an all-powerful sun god based loosely on Plato’s Demiurge from the Timaeus. But also like most men of his time and place, Constantine believed dreams meant something. On the eve of what might be the decisive battle for the Roman Empire, he was not about to take any chances. The next morning, he told his troops to paint the cross with the loop on their shields. Astonished but obedient, they did as ordered.
The two opposing armies finally met at a place called Saxa Rubra. Constantine rode at the head of his heavy cavalry and at the first charge sent Maxentius’s forward rank of armored horsemen flying back in disorder. Horses reared and screamed, men fought and died, the air was filled with cries of pain and triumph. Maxentius’s left and right flanks, guarded by troops from his African provinces, collapsed. His soldiers in between, hard pressed on three sides, wavered, then broke and ran.
The fleeing men reached the banks of the Tiber and the bridge. The original stone bridge, the Milvian Bridge, had been destroyed before the battle.2 However, Maxentius had lashed together a line of boats into a makeshift pontoon bridge, on which his troops had advanced into action. Now, panic-stricken, they scrambled onto it in their retreat. The bridge swayed and buckled under the weight of yelling, running refugees, horses, and wagons. Their commander, Maxentius, tried to restore order but found himself caught in the jam.
The tethers holding the bridge to the bank snapped. The boats pulled apart under the force of the current, and with a tremendous rending crash the whole thing gave way, plunging soldiers and horses, the emperor and officers, into the foaming Tiber. Constantine’s troops watched, fascinated, as their enemies were swept away in the torrent.
Later, soldiers found the body of Maxentius half-submerged in the sand along the shore, and still clad in his magnificent armor. They fished it out, cut off the head, and brought it back on the end of a spear to Constantine. He had his men then carry it at the front of his triumphant march into Rome—along with his new battle standard, or labarum, decorated with the miraculous looped cross.
Amid the round of congratulations after the battle, Constantine’s officers expressed their amazement. How had he managed to pull off this victory? He told them about the dream and the sign but confessed that its meaning was still a mystery to him.
Then, it seems, one of Constantine’s Christian officers spoke up. That wasn’t a cross you saw, he said. It must have been a Greek letter khi (X) super-imposed not on a loop, but on another Greek letter, rho (P). As every Greek-speaking Christian knew, these were the first letters of Khristós, or Christ. The voice you heard, Constantine was told, must have been that of God Himself.3 Later, someone also pointed out that the X looked exactly like the cross that Plato described in Timaeus as the basic shape into which God fashioned the World Soul. In short, Constantine’s new labarum had the authority not only of Christ behind it, but of Plato as well.4
Constantine was impressed. He knew Christians had become an important constituency in the Roman Empire, especially in the thriving commercial cities of the East like Antioch and Alexandria. He and his ally Licinius had both appealed for Christian support, promising a new era of toleration after a decade of brutal persecution by Diocletian and his colleagues.
Now, it seemed, their god had intervened decisively in his favor. It was time for Constantine to make a decisive intervention of his own. He cast aside his invincible sun god without a second thought. From this point on, he would consider himself a Christian in belief and deed. A month or two later, he issued his imperial Edict of Milan, which brought religious toleration to everyone in the empire, including Christians.
Nothing like it had ever been promulgated in the ancient world before—or ever was again.5 For the first time, Christians were free to rebuild their churches (Constantine also ordered confiscated Christian lands and property to be restored), spread their dioceses, and worship as they pleased in public. Overnight they turned from being a hunted minority into a sect on equal footing with their former persecutors.
However, the Christians did not stop there. They saw in the new emperor more than just a patron and protector. Constantine’s victory proved that he was God’s Chosen One, the ruler selected to lead humanity to a new era of peace and harmony. “Light was everywhere, and men who once dared not look up greeted each other with smiling faces and shining eyes.”6 Constantine would be the emperor who would finally make the world safe for Christianity.
This loyalty to the empire marked a major change in Christian attitudes. Until now, the Christian Church had viewed the fate of the Roman Empire with indifference and its rulers with contempt. The emperors had been among Christianity’s worst tormentors. They were also worshipped as pagan gods themselves: a clear act of blasphemy. To Origen and his generation, the idea that Christians had anything to gain, spiritually or materially, by supporting Rome’s governing institutions would have seemed absurd. “I owe no allegiance to any forum, army, or Senate,” wrote one of them, Tertullian, “All secular powers and dignities are not merely alien from, but hostile to, God.…”7
Thanks to Constantine, there was now the opportunity to reverse the controls. The Church seized it eagerly. The pagan Celsus had once sneered, “If all men wanted to be Christians, the Christians would not want them.” A century and a half later, the situation had completely changed. By 300, Christianity was ready to embrace the entire civilized world, along with the empire that held it together.8
Two Christians in particular used their position in Constantine’s inner circle to bring that about. The first was a Greek bishop named Eusebius; the other was a Latin-speaking royal tutor named Lactantius. They set out to persuade an empire that Christians, pagans, and Constantine himself had reached a unique moment in human history. One turned to Plato, the other to Aristotle, to cement their case.
Eusebius and Lactantius are now forgotten figures. No one except those in pursuit of a doctoral degree ever opens their works. But their rereadings of Plato and Aristotle would reset the horizons of the Western political imagination and present civilization with an entirely new problem: finding a workable dividing line between man’s religions and political impulses. Such a dividing line would never have occurred to the ancient Greeks or the Romans. Early Christians had other, more urgent things to worry about. Christ’s dictum “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” meant little to men and women whom Caesar was trying to kill.
It was the men of Constantine’s generation who put the issue of Church and State on the cultural map for the first time. The impact was momentous and almost immediate. A bishop in North Africa, Saint Augustine, would dream of a heavenly empire to replace an earthly one and write The City of God. Four centuries after that, on a cold Christmas Day, a barbarian Frankish king, Charlemagne, would be crowned as Holy Roman Emperor by another bishop, that of Rome. Men would fight and die in the struggle between empire and papacy in the Middle Ages; in the Reform
ation they would fight over the divine right of kings in the same way. Today we debate abortion, aid to parochial schools, and teaching evolution with less violence but with almost as much fervor.
It was Eusebius and Lactantius who set it all in motion, by trying to tell the bullnecked victor of Milvian Bridge how he came to power and why.
Neither man was a true Roman. Lucius Caecilius Lactantius came from North Africa and Eusebius from Caesarea in Syria, where he had studied under a pupil of Origen. Eusebius was a Christian Neoplatonist in Origen’s image: at one point he composed the vigorous In Defense of Origen, supporting what some in the Church saw as Origen’s runaway rationalism.9 After Milvian Bridge, however, Eusebius had found a new hero. Writing his History of the Church while sitting as bishop of Caesarea, he recast the entire history of Christianity so that it culminated in a single dazzling moment of Neoplatonic epiphany: the emperorship of Constantine.
It was a conclusion that would have surprised Origen, not to mention Saint Paul and Jesus. Eusebius, however, felt no compunction in explaining how everything that had happened in the Christian Church since the Crucifixion—all the apostolic labors, all the sudden conversions, all the persecutions and martyrdoms—had led inexorably to this miraculous event. Eusebius knew his biblical exegesis from Origen (who is a seminal figure in his History of the Church). He drew pointed parallels between Constantine leading Christians to victory and Moses leading the Jews to the Promised Land, and between the battle of Milvian Bridge and pharaoh’s armies being swept away by the Red Sea.10
The real weight of Eusebius’s argument, though, was that God, Supreme Creator and Governor of the universe, had deliberately chosen Constantine to be prince and sovereign in His name—in effect to be God’s living image on earth. Just as God’s only begotten son, Jesus, had drawn together all humanity with the promise of ultimate salvation, so God had deputized “an Emperor so great that all history had not reported his like,” in order to unite all the nations of the world under a single authority. Just as for a Platonist every visible material object is a copy of an invisible original Form, so Constantine’s imperial authority was a direct visible copy of God’s invisible but absolute power.
Constantine, “having the whole Christ, the Word, the Wisdom, the Light impressed upon his soul … frames his earthly government according to the pattern of the divine original, feeling strength in its conformity with the monarchy of God … for surely monarchy far transcends every other constitution and form of government.…”11 Constantine’s imperial presence is like the rising sun itself, Eusebius enthused, radiating truth from the imperial palace “as though ascending with the heavenly luminary” and shedding “upon all who came before his face the sunbeams of his generous goodness.”12
One empire under one absolute God, with one absolute ruler as His image on earth. The ancient Greco-Roman ideal that human government exists to serve human ends suddenly disappears from the scene. Instead, a luminous new image of political authority had arrived, which over time would radiate out from Constantinople and Rome across all of Christian Europe, from the shores of the Atlantic to the Urals.
This was an ideal of government serving divine ends, with God appointing and anointing a ruler to exercise supreme authority in His name. A coin from Constantine’s reign shows a great hand emerging from a cloud to place a crown on the emperor’s head—the very model of royal coronations from Charlemagne and the kings of England and France to the czars of Russia.13
This is kingship Neoplatonist style: the ruler as earthly image of God Himself. Not surprisingly, it was the model of rule Constantine’s successors enthusiastically embraced. The emperor Justinian will call himself Autokrator and Kosmokrator, literally “Ruler of the Cosmos.” He will sign documents with a special divine red ink. Royal officials receiving imperial documents (like his famous law code) would bow and reverently kiss the parchment as if it were Holy Scripture.14
Of course, absolute rulers had existed before. However, Near Eastern civilizations and the pagan Roman Empire had given their ruler absolute power because they were actual gods. After Eusebius, monarchs are Platonic copies of a higher invisible perfection. Not being God may seem a limitation to some, but exercising an earthly version of God’s omnipotence is certainly not bad. It was only much later, when the bishops of Rome as successors of St. Peter stepped up their claim to be God’s deputy, or vicarius (literally “vicar of Christ”), that the distinction stood out. Then what had seemed an asset, namely divine sanction, suddenly seemed a liability. Much of the political history of the Middle Ages will be spent trying sort out the balance sheet left behind by Eusebius.
At the time, however, his insistence that just as there is one absolute God, so there must be one absolute emperor was all that Constantine could have asked for and more. It would be passed down over the centuries to become the property of European monarchs from Charlemagne to Charles I of England and would be dazzlingly reflected in the images of the Sun King in Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
Eusebius had traced out this imperial theology from a Neoplatonist perspectve. His rival Lactantius attempted to do the same thing from the Aristotelian end, with similar momentous results. If Eusebius used Neoplatonism to explain to Constantine and his successors what their powers were, Lactantius used Aristotle to tell them what to do with them.
When Constantine came to the imperial throne in 312, Lucius Caecilius Lactantius was already renowned as “the most cultivated mind in the Empire,” according to his admirer Saint Jerome. He had arrived in Rome after teaching rhetoric in the North African town of Sicca Verentia (El Kef in modern-day Tunisia), a bustling commercial center on the road to the great port at Hippo Regius. Lactantius’s earlier conversion to Christianity had once cost him his job and almost his life. Under Constantine, however, it brought him favor and advancement as tutor to Constantine’s son.
The books and treatises Lactantius wrote were largely for the edification of the imperial heir. We know Constantine himself looked over their pages and pondered their arguments. Virtually everything Constantine knew about Christian doctrine he probably got from Lactantius.15 As we would expect from a teacher of the ancient rhetorical tradition, Lactantius attempted to describe the new Christian empire in terms a Cicero might recognize: Cicero’s On Moral Obligations was in fact the model for his great Divine Institutes.16 However, in the background of Lactantius’s ideas there lurks another earlier figure, namely Aristotle.
Like every good Aristotelian, Lactantius began his discussion of political power by looking first at the society it governs. Yes, Constantine’s victory was a sign from God; and yes, he is the image of God, and therefore his authority is absolute. All the same, Lactantius explained, that authority is underpinned by a larger process, which was the emergence of a distinctly Christian society to replace the earlier pagan one.
Lactantius observed that religion (religio) comes from the verb religare, meaning “to tie or bind.” Religion is about bonds between God and man, but also between man and man. Like Aristotle’s polis, Lactantius’s Christian societas is a partnership made up of families who have come together in order to work together. “A kind God wants us to be social animals,” he wrote, echoing Aristotle’s definition of man as zoon politikon, “because all humans need mutual support.”17 The difference is that these Christian families have come together not to get rich or practice a craft, but to practice the virtues of their faith. They seek to achieve their destiny not only as social creatures, but as divine ones made in the image of God.18
Lactantius’s Christian society doesn’t stand in the way of human nature. It is human nature operating at its highest pitch. Even before Constantine appeared on the scene and Lactantius was still studying at Sicca, one of his Christian professors, Arnobius, had taught how Christianity was already making the world more civilized and wars less violent, because its teachings had softened men’s hearts and awakened their consciences. One day, the old man predicted to Lactantius, wars will be
unnecessary. Swords really will be beaten into plowshares, just as Scripture predicted; and mankind would realize its full potential through virtue, self-restraint, justice, and excellence.
Christian society achieves its self-actualization, as Aristotle might say, through the union of faith and reason. At a quick glance, this societas resembles the Roman res publica, the classic commonwealth. But it is not one in which Cicero or Aristotle would find many landmarks. The politics of persuasion, on which so much depended for both Aristotle and Cicero, withers away. There will be no need for it (a strange position for a former professor of rhetoric to take). Individual choice and social distinctions have no place, either. Indeed, Lactantius seeks to abolish them both, especially the division between rich and poor. And instead of consisting of five thousand citizens as in Plato’s Republic, this Christian republic will be universal, stretching out to encompass all humanity.
The concept of Christendom as a universal (in Greek, katholikos) community of shared values and ideals, living together in peace and harmony, had arrived.19 It comes about not through men obeying nature (as Aristotle would have framed it), but through obeying God. Or rather it will come about someday in the not-too-distant future, when all men everywhere follow His community. Until then arrives, Lactantius admits, men still need laws and a lawmaker, the emperor. But this political power in its new Christian form must be directed toward a higher end than simply maintaining public order and the Pax Romana. Constantine and his successors serve a higher constituency, namely all of humanity. Their task is to create a world fit for Christians to live in, and one that eventually they will take over.
Constantine took up the challenge with enthusiasm. He announced that he was the agent whose services God had deemed suitable for the accomplishment of His will (this was after he had driven Licinius, his only remaining rival and a pagan, from the scene). “With the aid of divine power, I banished and destroyed every form of evil which prevailed, in the hope that the human race, enlightened by my instruction, might be recalled to a due observance of God’s holy laws.…”20 By 323, he established a brand-new capital for himself at Constantinople, to be a truly Christian capital free of any lingering pagan stain from Rome.
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